


Easier than Air with Air

by AMarguerite



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angelic Lore, Other, Wing Grooming, tv canon rather than book canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 21:45:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19159597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: InParadise Lost, Milton describes angels having sex as:Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,Total they mix, union of pure with pureDesiring, nor restrained conveyance need,As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.After the Apoco-lapse, Aziraphale takes up Crowley's offer to stay at his place. Crowley takes Aziraphale on another offer entirely. Of the Miltonian variety.





	Easier than Air with Air

Aziraphale wasn’t sure how he expected Crowley’s flat to look, but he hadn’t expected Crowley to try and recreate a miniature Eden. There was something… rather psychological about it, if one could apply a human idea like psychology to an occult entity like Crowley. Admittedly, today had definitely proved he and Crowley were on the side of humanity rather than anything else. Crowley muttered something vaguely apologetic about the state of the place, to which Aziraphale hastily said, “Oh no, no, no, dear boy, it’s perfectly lovely. Thank you for inviting me to stay here the night.”

Crowley lowered his sunglasses to eye a quivering rhododendron. “Hm.”

Aziraphale took an idle turn about the plant room. He had never seen houseplants as variegated or as lush, except for… well,  _ Eden _ , and was surprised into saying, “Well hello there, aren’t you lovely?” to a bonzai tree mysteriously and bravely sprouting a regular sized apple. “How very marvelous!”

“You’ll spoil them,” grumbled Crowley. 

“Oh I don’t think so,” replied Aziraphale. “Didn’t you say  _ you  _ talked to them?”

“Not like that,” Crowley said, and then withdrew from a half open wall. “Yech. I forgot about that. Give us a hand will you? There’s holy water all over the floor.”

“Holy water?” Aziraphale had been patting a fern in a fondly absent way, surprised at how it arched up towards his hand inquisitively, like a friendly cat, and immediately jumped back. “Oh no. Crowley, when they said that they’d come for you— oh my dear I hadn’t realized—”

“ _ They  _ didn’t have it,” said Crowley, grimly. “When I said I wanted insurance all those years ago, it wasn’t to use against myself.”

Aziraphale felt a long held worry dissolve. He was capable of justifying away any number of unpleasant events caused by his side, but if Crowley had used the holy water on himself, as an attempt to avoid whatever Hell had in store for him because he’d had an understanding with an angel— oh dear, the whole mess  _ would  _ have been Aziraphale’s fault, wouldn’t it? He’d have been the author of his dearest friend’s destruction in all possible ways. And then he’d have to live in  _ a world without Crowley. _ A fitting punishment for such an awful sin.

“It’s right here,” cut in Crowley’s voice. He pointed at a little puddle by an open door, an over-turned bucket, and a pile of of shabby black clothes. “Can you…?”

“I don’t suppose you have a mop?” 

Crowley looked faintly embarrassed, and then said, “Er… yes. Course I do. I definitely have a mop. It’s right behind you.”

Aziraphale turned and discovered an enormous palm tree quiveringly holding it out to him. “Thank you, my dear. And what lovely fronds you have.”

The palm tree didn’t seem to know what to make of this. Aziraphale took the mop and tidied up, making very sure to get it all. There were certain senses angels could never quite turn off. He could not perhaps  _ see  _ it with the human eyes of this particular body, but with senses that belonged to a noncorporal form of pure energy, he knew where every last bit of holy water was. (1)

“There,” he said brightly, banishing mop, bucket, and pile of holy water soaked clothes to the janitor’s closet of a nearby church, where it couldn’t harm Crowley. “All gone.”

Crowley looked up from the houseplant he’d been inspecting. “I sssssee a withered leaf.” He glared slowly around at all the plants. “A  _ withered leaf _ .”

The plants began to tremble.

Aziraphale looked around, not sure what to make of this. 

“You see this withered leaf?” Crowley picked up the potted devil’s snare and held it aloft, as if he were trying to do a one demon show of  _ The Lion King _ . “You  _ ssssee it _ ?”

“It’s just one leaf,” said Aziraphale, not particularly enjoying the theatrics. 

“We can’t have it,” declared Crowley. “Everyone say goodbye to your friend! You won’t be seeing him again.”

“Crowley, the poor thing’s doing it’s best!”

“It’s best is not good enough,” said Crowley, stalking his way down the hall. 

It seemed overkill to make a comment on exile from the garden but Aziraphale felt he ought to protest in some form or other, if only to address what seemed to him long-buried feelings about Crowley’s Fall being worked out via plant murder. But he stopped in his tracks when he saw, at the end of the hall, a lectern shaped like an eagle. It seemed  _ awfully _ familiar. Aziraphale frowned at it. 

That couldn’t be from that church back in 1941… could it? The events of the whole evening had been engraved as strikingly in Aziraphale’s memory as if he’d handed William Blake a sheet of metal and said, “You know what to do, my dear.” (2) 

“Bzz bzz bzz,” went a woodchipper.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale rushed into a room by the lectern, to see Crowley running an empty woodchipper and carefully repotting the devil’s snare into a large planter with several other drooping specimens carefully tied to take-out chopsticks. There was an open bag of fertilizer sticks beside it, and some sun lamps in the corner.

Crowley looked mildly annoyed. “Close the door,” he hissed. “I don’t want the others getting any  _ ideas _ .” 

Aziraphale did so, though he couldn’t help but ask, “You don’t want… your plants… getting any ideas?”

“I won’t have any slackers,” Crowley said darkly. He rose up, switched off the woodchipper and went back out into the hall, the pot dangling from one finger. His roar of, “Grow better!” echoed down the corridor.

Aziraphale looked around the room. He liked it much better than the rest of the flat. It wasn’t cavernously empty, with uncomfortable couches and no signs of habitation. Everything was a little imperfect here. Plants with spots, or broken stalks, or straggly petals. An actually comfortable easy chair. A table beside it, with a loaf of bread meant for the ducks of St. James’s Park, and a used glass, with a couple of old playbills as coasters.

Drawn to the only reading material in the place, Aziraphale settled himself in the chair, and began sorting through them. They all seemed to be playbills from shows he had dragged Crowley to over the years, including a  _ very  _ old playbill announcing the debut of  _ Hamlet.  _ He was sentimentally touched, before realizing what very bad archival practice this was. “Oh dear, I know half-a-dozen curators at the British Library who would trade their souls for this,” Aziraphale muttered. 

“Please,” said Crowley, dismissively. “I’m not in  _ that  _ racket any longer.” 

Aziraphale miracled it into better condition, and then into a proper acid-free paper folder. (3)

Crowley had once again given up on glasses; he held an open bottle of Merlot and offered it to Aziraphale. 

‘ _ A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou, _ ’ thought Aziraphale. ‘ How does the rest of it go? _ Something in the wilderness— O, Wilderness were Paradise enow—’ _

“Not thirsty?” Crowley asked, tilting the bottle towards him. 

“Must put this out of the way first.” Aziraphale looked about him. 

“Trade you.” Crowley took the folder and stuck it on the lectern, before shutting the door again. Aziraphale drank from the bottle, well aware that Crowley’s lips had been where his now touched. He felt strangely off-kilter to be in Crowley’s flat. There was a little bubble of privacy about them which had never existed before, and Aziraphale didn’t know what to make of it. They always stuck to public places, or to his bookshop— which was, technically public. (4) The space he thought of as Crowley’s was the Bentley and that… had met the same firey death as his bookshop. Another of the odd parallels between them he’d resolutely seen and ignored for the past few days. 

“Not going to say anything about the plants?” Crowley asked.

The old urge to needle Crowley, to reassert the safe distance of ‘angel’ and ‘demon’ rose up. “They’re lovely. Really, Crowley, the ones in here  _ particularly. _ ” He passed back the wine bottle and gushed over the devil’s snare until it shyly blossomed. “Oh look at that! How beautiful. I suppose it just needed a little  _ encouragement _ , and a little recuperation from  _ shell-shock _ —”

“No one’s used the term shell shock in a century.”

Aziraphale ignored him, and cooed at the plant as if it were an illuminated manuscript he'd been dying to own since 1300. 

Crowley sauntered over to the chair. 

Ethereal and occult beings crammed into human bodies often look slightly wrong. There is the suggestion of wearing a body as one might a uniform, something not quite right about the eyes, as if an earnest student has made a copy without entirely understanding how all the parts fit together, or, indeed, what parts one ought to use. Aziraphale knew that he had got all the bits looking right, but he wore his body a little stiffly. He’d sit reading for so long he often collected dust. He liked to fold the arms and legs and keep them tidily in place. Crowley had gone the opposite route. He never managed to figure out how to make round rather than slit pupils, and he walked as if he wasn’t sure what to do with his pelvis, so why not swing it around and see where it landed? He had also failed to learn how humans actually sat in chairs. Today he sprawled horizontally, one leg dangling over the arm of the chair. 

“Your eyes are looking a little better,” said Aziraphale. “They got rather, er….”

“Happens, when I’m not paying attention.” Crowley took a swig from the wine bottle. “Your wings were looking shabby again. Don’t you groom them yourself?”

“You know I don’t,” said Aziraphale, feeling tired and cross. “Angels don’t. No self-respecting angel would  _ groom their own wings. _ You were an angel once— surely you recall?”

Crowley’s shrug somehow rippled through his body, giving the impression of a snake twisting up a tree. “It was before the beginning. I’ve been thinking about it more than I usually do, but… you know. Six thousand years as a demon. You don’t turn your back on a fellow demon, unless you  _ want _ a knife in it.” 

Aziraphale manifested his wings again, being careful of the plants. He turned his head to look at them. So perhaps they were a little… ruffled, but they were as white and feathery as ever. A rush of relief went through him. He was still, technically, an angel. The other angels might have something to say about that tomorrow, but at the present moment—

“Crowley, my dear,” said Aziraphale hesitantly. “Was it crashing down through all the spheres that… that changed you?”

“Gabriel won’t throw you into a lake of boiling sulfur because you ruined the Apocalypse,” said Crowley, catching onto Aziraphale’s underlying fear. “It’s closed for maintenance and they have elevators nowadays anyhow.” He let out a hiss of laughter. ”I’m not sure Hell will let you Fall. They don’t want you. They certainly don’t want me.”

“You never wanted to be on their side,” Aziraphale suddenly realized.

Crowley suddenly decided to try and find the bottom of the wine bottle. 

“Is that why,” Aziraphale asked, feeling both touched and embarrassed, “you kept saying we were on our side? And… and asking me to run off with you?”

“Partly.” 

‘ _ There’s a wealth of inferences in that _ ,’ Aziraphale thought, ‘ _ if I care to read into them _ .’ Aziraphale, feeling decidedly  _ flustered _ , mentally decided that he’d forgotten his reading glasses. (5) He held out a hand for the bottle. Crowley gave it to him, with a strangely hopeless look. 

“I never meant to Fall,” said Crowley, abruptly. “I just… asked questions. I don’t know if She disliked it, but your lot did. Lucifer and the gang didn’t. At least not then. And then—” He waved his hands, trying to encompass the Fall, but he brushed one of Aziraphale’s wings and a few loose feathers drifted out. “And now, I’m… me. Unforgivable. The demon Crowley. Original tempter. So changed in essence that holy water could melt me.”   

“But if Hell doesn’t want you back—”

Crowley snorted. “Come off it Aziraphale. Your side’s not going to be willing to grant me immunity. Not when they’re already going to want to punish you.” 

“I know. There’s just the earth for us now.” Aziraphale took a hesitant swig of the wine bottle and then set it down. “Are my wings that much of a mess? I haven’t had them groomed since before the Antichrist’s birthday, when I checked in at Head Office.”  

“A lot’s happened since then.” 

“Yes, and, I, er… I can’t….” He made a little helpless gesture. 

Crowley mockingly pouted at him but nonetheless waved a hand. A low stool appeared before Crowley’s chair, and all the other items near them jumped back. “Come on then. Let’s see if I remember how to do someone else’s.” 

He did, as it turned out. Crowley snagged a plant mister and spritzed Aziraphale’s feathers before smoothing them all out with his fingers, so that they lay flat and pointed in the right direction. Crowley was as gentle in this as he was in repotting the formerly wilting devil’s snare. Aziraphale momentarily forgot that the world had almost ended, that he had faced Satan with only a flaming sword, a demon with a tire iron, and an eleven-year-old boy with the power to warp reality. He even very nearly forgot that Heaven and Hell personally held him and Crowley responsible for delaying the Apocolaypse. They had the earth, but for how much longer?

There was a little pile of loose feathers at the end; Aziraphale slowly turned one of his broken pinions between two fingers. “Thank you, my dear.”

“Couldn’t stand to see ‘em in that condition,” Crowley said with false nonchalance. 

“How are yours?” Aziraphale asked.

“Fine.”

“My dear,” said Aziraphale, exasperated. “In case you’ve forgotten, it goes both ways.”

“I had,” said Crowley.

There wasn’t anything to say to that, really— or nothing that Aziraphale could think to say. He felt a surge of quite maudlin tenderness. “It feels uneven if I don’t— oh do let’s switch places.”

They did, and Crowley spread out his wings. They were black as a crow’s. Fitting, thought Aziraphale, reaching for the plant mister. Crowley loved shiny new things and was damnably curious. Literally damnably it seemed. Aziraphale had never asked how or why Crowley had Fallen before. It had seemed rude at first. And then they’d just known each other too long as ‘angel’ and ‘demon’ and it became very easy to forget that Crowley had ever been anything than what he currently was. 

“I think,” Crowley said, as Aziraphale was fluffing up a section of newly preened feathers, “it’s holy water for me. They’ll want to do it after what I did to Ligur.”

“I suppose that’s the one who’s clothes…?”

Crowley nodded. 

“They’ll probably destroy me too,” Aziraphale replied, hands shaking a little. “I did think they’d throw me out but if… if Hell doesn’t want me, then I think that last prophesy of Agnes Nutter's must be about my end.” He’d already read it so often he had it memorized. “When all is faced and all is done, ye must choose your faces wisely, for soon enough you will be playing with fire.” Aziraphale worked loose a bent feather, and said, in an over-bright voice. “Crowley, I think it’s hellfire for me.”

“Hellfire,” said Crowley.

“Same effect as holy water would be on you,” said Aziraphale, feeling the odd compulsion to keep a stiff upper lip about it. (6) “There’s a nice symmetry to it, I suppose.”

Crowley’s hands had been resting on his knees; he clutched them tightly. “It’s been a good six millenia.”

“I wish it didn’t end like this,” said Aziraphale. He kept fluffing up Crowley’s feathers, not because they needed it, but because it comforted him, made him feel as if they really were on their own side. He didn’t like thinking about their side of two, and so asked, “I think I recognize that lectern right outside this room.”

“Yep?” Crowley made the ‘p’ pop, no doubt out of the same desire to needle Aziraphale had felt earlier. 

“Did you… my dear, that was from that church in 1941, wasn’t it?”

“They weren’t using it anymore.” 

Aziraphale passed his hand over the now smooth feathers of Crowley’s wing. It hadn’t needed any grooming— Crowley took excellent care of his wings and had had six millenia to perfect doing it on his own— but it soothed Aziraphale to run his fingers through their glossy blackness, to return to a habit that had been the social glue of the angelic hosts for so long. They weren’t so very different, really. Crowley had been an angel once. Aziraphale had always been looking for the signs of it. And when Crowley had not only saved him from that Nazi spy ring, but saved his books—

It had been the two of them, then. Just as it was now. Just as it would be, for however long they had left. 

“You know it was at that moment,” Aziraphale said, unsure what reaction he was trying to provoke anymore, “that I realized—”

Crowley tilted his head back. “What?”

“You— you and I,” he stammered, “we’re… we’re from the same original stock. We aren’t so  _ very  _ different. Especially now.”

Crowley stretched, arms overhead, and then stood. “You figure?”

“You still have the same kind of wings,” said Aziraphale. 

“I just keep them in better order,” Crowley said dryly.

“Yes, and I, um… I wonder.” Aziraphale blushed. “I don’t suppose you… or the Fallen really, kept  _ all  _ the same rituals, or do it the same way anymore, but do you recall… you know. Mixing energies. Up in heaven. To show one’s love.”

“Oh yeah.” Crowley prodded at the devil’s snare, and gave it a nervous misting from the spray bottle. “Humans have something like it, but it’s a messy business. Bodies get in the way.”

If he was going to be completely honest with himself— which he almost never was— Aziraphale had spent the last eighty years wondering if Crowley recalled such angelic mergings. Ever since Crowley had ventured onto hallowed ground on his behalf and remembered to _ save Aziraphale’s books _ . Who wouldn’t have fallen? Well, not  _ Fallen  _ fallen, thought Aziraphale, glancing at the well-groomed spread of white feathers at his shoulder. 

And… angels were creatures made to love. That was the purpose for which Aziraphale was created. Presumably. Head Office interpreted this love as a distant, objective sort of action. Aziraphale had always told himself that he loved everyone and everything— even Crowley— in this fashion. But Aziraphale knew that he had been  _ in  _ love with Crowley for over eighty years. He’d just about got his mind around the shape of it. And now… oh it seemed such a  _ rush _ . 

“I go too fast for you, I know,” Crowley said abruptly, turning to look at him, “but I’m um. Up for anything you like. You know that. Surely you do.”

“I do.” Aziraphale looked up at Crowley, saw the faint half-curl of a smile. “ I don’t know how one… accomplishes it while corporated, though. Does one just leave the body behind for a bit? I got the hang of possessing people earlier today. I hadn’t realized I could do that before.” 

“We could have shared a body, probably,” said Crowley. “When you asked about it in the pub. I don’t think it would have hurt you. But, ah… I think… it’s rather similar. If you just try to follow me, we could probably....” He extended a hand to Aziraphale. 

Aziraphale closed his eyes and took it. He felt a slight jolt as he stepped out of his body, following the movement of Crowley’s spirit and then—

—oh it was as he had remembered and yet so much  _ better.   _

Easier than air mixing with air; they joined. 

A sweet rush of uncomplicated joy overtook him, as he mixed with Crowley. There was nothing to divide or separate them. The shape of the love he felt expanded. He loved Crowley and Crowley loved him and they loved each other. That was it. That was all.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed in so complete a union. The ecstasy of the moment made Aziraphale feel as if he was outside of time. And it wasn’t as if he was feeling this with any senses comprehensible to humans. There was very little human about it. 

At the point pleasure had exhausted them both, Crowley pulled back. Aziraphale followed, a little dreamily, and found himself in a body once more.

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Oh. Oh  _ my _ .”

Or at least, he thought he’d said it, but he heard Crowley’s voice. Aziraphale wondered if this was perhaps an after effect of angelic joining. It made sense that there would be a little difficulty in dividing again after, and confining oneself to a much smaller number of dimensions. 

Aziraphale heard his own voice reply, “I haven’t done that since… I suppose time hadn’t been invented then.”

Must be an aftereffect, Aziraphale thought. Or at least he did until he remembered he needed to open his eyes to see, and looked down at himself, still sitting in the chair… only not sitting properly, like a human would do, all limbs neatly folded. The Aziraphale in the chair was beaming soppily at nothing, and  _ lounging _ , limbs akimbo.  

“Hm,” Aziraphale said, in Crowley’s voice. “I think something’s gone wrong, my dear.”

Crowley opened his eyes— which were really Aziraphale’s eyes and… oh dear, this was perplexing. 

“Yeeees, um," said Aziraphale-in-Crowley's-body. "I don’t think I  _ quite  _ got the hang of possession as much as I thought.” 

Crowley-in-Aziraphale’s-body stared at him. “Appears not, angel.”

“I do like feeling this close to you,” said Aziraphale, twisting about. “I smell like you. Oh my. Is your sense of smell always this sharp?”

“Yes. Your body’s remarkably comfortable. No sharp edges.” Crowley sank into it. “Only there’s something in your pocket here—”

“That would be Agnes Nutter’s prophecy, probably,” said Aziraphale, trying to figure out how Crowley’s hips worked. He had  _ assumed  _ they worked normally, but now he wasn’t entirely sure. The way he was moving Crowley's hips certainly didn’t look like the way Crowley moved them. 

“When all is faced and all is done, ye must choose your faces wisely, for soon enouff you will be playing with fyre,” read Crowley, in Aziraphale’s voice. He looked thoughtful. “Ye must choose your faces….” He sat up. “Aziraphale, I think we may have failed our way to a solution.”

“Have we?” He looked at his own face, wearing a very Crowley expression, and suddenly smiled. “Why, I think we might have. This might not be the end after all.”

“Thank God,” said Crowley, grinning, “that you finally propositioned me.” 

  
  


  1. The question of what an angel looked like when it wasn’t deciding to look vaguely humanoid plus wings generally ended up in the category of ‘you really don’t want to know the answer.’
  2. William Blake was a Romantic poet, an engraver of very striking images of the angels who visited him in his garden. This did not include Aziraphale, who politely came in the front of the shop, looking like quite an ordinary bookseller. 
  3. It went to the back room of his bookshop as soon as Aziraphale realized he still had a bookshop. He really kept _meaning_ to take it to the British Library, or some smaller library with a related collection, where a desperate PhD student was praying for an archival miracle, but he was just so _busy_ after the Apocalypse that wasn’t. And really, English graduate students ought to learn not rely on divine intervention to get their degrees, no matter how sorry Aziraphale felt for them, the poor dears. 
  4. On the rare occasions it was actually open.
  5. Not that Aziraphale has ever needed reading glasses. Angelic bodies— whether Fallen or not— may not look quite right, but function perfectly. Aziraphale merely enjoyed the fact that he could make words on a page bigger without altering the physical book. Humans! What _will_ they invent next, the strange, dear creatures?
  6. Aziraphale had been a principality of England for a _very_ long time. With that came a certain embrace of the chosen characteristics of the country he was supposed to watch over.



**Author's Note:**

> The reason Aziraphale likes glasses is courtesy of pipcomix!


End file.
